story by Claire Miller
Brendan Calandra, chair of the Department of Learning Sciences, and Associate Professor Jonathan Cohen co-authored an article in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education on a group of middle school students’ confidence and motivation as it related to their reusing and remixing when learning to code.
“Reusing means using existing pieces of code to have the computer perform certain tasks without having to write a program from scratch,” Calandra explained. “Remixing code involves taking existing pieces of code, tweaking them and then combining them to create something new.”
Calandra and Cohen worked with students and colleagues from other institutions as a part of a larger project funded by the National Science Foundation to conduct studies in two different settings – one in a computing class during the regular school day and one during an after-school program.
First, students in both settings answered a series of questions to gauge their interest in computing; their prior experience with the subject matter; their learning goals; and their self-efficacy, or their belief in their own ability to code.
Then, students learned to use a program called App Inventor to design apps for mobile phones. App Inventor allows you to build mobile apps using a visual design approach with blocks of preexisting code, like assembling pieces of a digital puzzle or building with Legos made of code snippets.
The students first completed a series of activities that included step-by-step instructions for app development, and then used what they learned as well as code snippets from the initial activities to create their own app by reusing and remixing.
The research team reviewed the completed apps to see to what extent the students reused and remixed existing code to develop their own personalized apps. Then, they conducted statistical analyses to determine relationships between the answers they had provided prior to the activities and evidence of reusing and remixing in the apps that students had created during the activities.
In both settings, students who were remixing more often also seemed to have stronger beliefs in their own ability as coders and showed a higher level of self-efficacy. In the after-school setting, students whose goal or motivation for doing the activity was understanding how to build an app also tended to do more remixing.
“Self-efficacy can play a central role in shaping the attitudes, behaviors and outcomes of students who are learning how to code. Students with high self-efficacy in coding are more likely to be motivated to learn and persist in the face of challenges,” Calandra said.
“Goal orientation is an essential part of self-regulated learning, which is a learner’s ability to understand and control their own learning environment,” he added. “It seems like students in this study who were able to successfully remix code in their projects reported higher levels of goal orientation and self-efficacy. This indicates a motivation to learn and an ability to regulate one’s own learning experience.”
Calandra, Cohen and their colleagues recommend that researchers and practitioners continue to examine the reciprocal relationship between self-efficacy, motivation, self-regulated learning and learning how to code through reusing and remixing.
“This study also emphasizes the fact that it is important to pay attention to instructional designs that can promote students’ motivation to learn, especially in a challenging and potentially daunting field like computer science,” Calandra said, “This can be one way to help broaden the diversity and breadth of students who become interested in computer science.”